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Archive → January, 2012

With Tuesday’s historic decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the recent redistricting, the former PA – 15th senate district remains intact. That means that I am now back in a district from which senator Jeff Piccola is retiring, and for which I can run.

The Pennsylvania 15th Senate District is a beautiful place, really the heartland of America. It also includes Harrisburg, the state capital and one of the major Underground Railroad thruways, with one of the nation’s most majestic public edifices, the capitol building.
It is an honor to declare my candidacy for the 15th Senate District.
Please let me know if you can volunteer to circulate petitions, which are due by February 15th.

Last year I was nabbed by a red light camera in New York City. Wondering why, at the time, the yellow light lasted all of about half a second, I found out a month later when the neatly packaged “fine” arrived by US Mail.
Turns out that red light cameras are big business. Municipalities have been caught rigging yellow light times to blink-of-an-eye spans so that more drivers qualify for red light tickets. Never mind that shorter yellow lights cause many more drivers to slam on their brakes, and then get hit from behind, so that safety is not increased. Rather, these cameras are all about the money, for both the private companies that install and maintain them, and for the municipalities that have their hands in your pocket.
Across the nation there has been a citizen-led fight to reclaim red lights from the Nanny Staters, and below is a link to an outstanding Weekly Standard article about red light cameras written by Jonathan Last (yes, yes, our names are the opposite).
Read it and learn how to return at least a smidgen of control to We The People, and how the red light camera companies are fighting back to retain their huge profits.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/rolling-back-nanny-state_577297.html?page=1

President Obama has nixed the Keystone Pipeline.
Environmental advocates applaud as the project dies, even as America continues to depend on foreign oil from people who hate us. It doesn’t make much sense.
What’s needed is a good dose of old fashioned conservation. You know, mitigate the pipeline’s impacts by protecting the land around it, thereby turning it into a permanent wildlife corridor and greenway.
Maybe even a transcontinental trail can run along it.
If I had anything to say about it, these kinds of solutions would be on the table, and the project would be moving forward.

Obama’s State of the Union speech was meant to make him sound and appear moderate. Despite my enormous differences with Obama, I found a couple things I liked last night.
The best part was listening to him try to market his disastrous presidency to a skeptical nation.
Mr. President, you have a problem: You’re going to lose your election this November.

As I write this, US senator Rand Paul is in a standoff with TSA agents in Nashville Airport.

Passing through a scanner set it off for some odd reason, probably a belt buckle or a pen, as has been my own experience, and when he sought to pass through the same scanner again, the TSA agents denied him that option and demanded that he subject himself to a full pat-down.

Correctly , Senator Paul declined to submit his free American body to such an enormous and unnecessary invasion of his personal liberty by the government, and he is now reportedly standing in the gate area, waiting to either pass through the scanner again or be granted access to his plane

TSA agents will not allow him to do either.

The situation is developing by the minute, but irrespective of how it turns out, this is one more example of how badly awry the TSA experiment has gone, and how necessary it is for the TSA to be dissolved and replaced by some pre-existing agency or government body. TSA’s culture is a a disaster.

Americans are a free people, and we deserve government employees who put personal liberty ahead of marginal gains in security, who put individual liberty ahead of personal power plays. Will Rand Paul become the Rosa Parks of the TSA?

UPDATE: Senator Rand Paul’s father, Texas Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul issued an on-the-money statement about how America is becoming, or has become, a police state, and that the TSA must be abolished. Additionally, many have pointed out that Article I, Section 6 of the US Constitution says “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same….” In other words, TSA’s blocking of Senator Paul from reaching scheduled votes in Washington, DC, directly violates the US Constitution.

One of America’s greatest idols and sports leaders has died today. The immediate cause was cancer. We all know that the real cause was the unfair firing he experienced from the Penn State board of trustees.

Given how much Joe loved Penn State, the college students there, the State College community, and setting the high standards that most Americans quietly sought to emulate, Joe was broken hearted after receiving a scribbled note to make a call, and after making the call, being fired 40 seconds later, when he was hung up on.

Joe Paterno did not abuse the kids who Jerry Sandusky abused. He did not stand idly by while the horrors continued. Joe Paterno reported what he was told, within 24 hours, to his superiors, and was not responsible for what happened afterwards. He was one of the only people, maybe the only person who knew something, who actually acted on the information about Sandusky to someone in a position of power. Since last November, Joe has been shouldering the entire incident, as though child and family services, The Second Mile, Curley and Shultz, the 1998 police investigation and unwillingness by the Centre County district attorney to press charges, and others are exonerated of what they knew and their failures to act over the years. Blaming Joe is a dis-service.

Lots of people attacking Joe as though he was responsible demonstrates the failure of a large segment of American culture.

In the spirit of modern America, the faster a hero dies, the better we all feel about our own weaknesses and failings, as though our heroes weren’t really so superior after all.

Sure, Joe could have done more. Can’t we all say or do the same for something we have witnessed, like a car stalled by the side of the road that we pass by? A person struggling with heavy groceries, or bills? Someone engaged in nefarious behavior, but we look the other way because we “don’t want to get involved”?

Lots of arm chair sheriffs and would-be vigilantes have been spawned by the Sandusky scandal. Lots of “Why, I woulda socked him in the jaw, and then thrown him down, and then handcuffed him and led him to the police myself, if only I had been there…” Lots of that phony cyber hero crap, and that’s what it is, crap, has been written, not only out of frustration with Penn State’s failure to snag Sandusky early, but with Joe’s “moral failing” to do more.

Sure he could have done more. But so could the PSU board of trustees, long ago, when the first reports came out about Sandusky in 2002. By tearing down one of America’s great icons, the trustees enveloped themselves in a mantle of superiority…more crap.

Joe Paterno died of a broken heart because his one awww shucks destroyed an incredible 60-year career filled with nothing but atta-boys, with generous giving and building that set the highest standard for loyalty and commitment.

Joe deserved better than he got in the end, and he died from having his will to live broken. I will miss you, Joe, we all will miss you.

Party endorsements are common practice in Pennsylvania. A vestige of the bad old days of smoke filled back rooms, where party bosses selected candidates to receive party support and favors, endorsements have come under fire in recent years.
The most compelling reason is that voters feel disenfranchised. Another reason is that endorsement processes appear to favor weak, moderate, wishy-washy candidates who do not stand on their own merits or strong personal character, but rather people who will do and say what they are told.
Feeling fed up with milquetoast candidates who seem to stand for nothing but being everything to everyone, increasing numbers of Republican voters are rejecting the party endorsement process.
Pennsylvania is one of the last states to do endorsements, and the effort to end it is from the ground-up, led by grass roots candidates as well as former elected officials now on the outside of the party. Rick Santorum and Sam Rohrer are two examples. Santorum is running for president, and Rohrer for US senate.
Governor Tom Corbett recently endorsed Steve Welch for the US senate nomination, but it may boomerang. Welch was recently a registered Democrat who apparently voted for Barack Hussein Obama. I met Welch, and he publicly denied voting for Obama, but like others in the room at the time, his disavowal seemed untrue to me and was met with great skepticism by the conservative activists in the room.
It’s likely that Welch will come under fire for this as well as his unclear positions on important policy positions. He does come across as a heck of a nice guy. But more and more conservatives want gritty leaders who will stick to their guns, and they reject endorsements that promote candidates like Welch.
My own wish is that the Republican Party not make any endorsements.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined US president Barack Hussein Obama in excoriating US Marine Corps snipers who appear to be faking urinating on dead Taliban terrorists on the field of battle.

Watching the clip, which was shot as though it were under cover, you can see that the Marines have their privates covered, an unusual circumstance in the field. They knew they were being filmed. Each one is going through the motions of urinating on the dead men, but none of them appear to be actually peeing. Nobody’s beef is showing, and no correlating wetness is seen on the dead terrorists. I didn’t see any streams, either.

The terrorists are wet, true, but it’s from their own blood, a situation that often arises when you fight with the US Marine Corps.

Sure, the symbolism of the faked act is brutal, but then again, the dead guys were trying to turn the Marines into dead guys, and they lost, Thank God. The whole situation is utterly brutal.

The symbolism of appearing to pee on your dead enemy may violate some code of wartime ethics written by a four-eyed nerd sitting at a desk somewhere far away from a battlefield, and that’s too bad. OK, mild verbal reprimands are due for that. Bad Marines. Don’t pretend to pee on dead enemies again, OK?

What’s odd about our own leaders’ criticism is that they didn’t mitigate their own brutal statements with something like “Our men are brave and constantly challenged by savages who use women and children as human shields, so while we regret their lapse of judgment, we also understand that they are in extreme life-or-death situations that none of us can imagine.”

Or they might mention the savage acts regularly perpetrated by the Taliban on everyone around them, where getting peed on would be welcome abuse compared to what could be next.

But no, Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton did not offer any understanding of why or how our men, engaged in hand to hand fighting and subject to death at any second, might demonstrate their disdain for proven cowards like the Taliban.

The cowards here are Obama and Clinton, known anti-military activists who blame America for everything wrong on the planet. Sure, America has an interest in maintaining some semblance of a steady relationship with the government of Afghanistan, but given Afghanistan’s corruption and official day to day brutality, our troops deserved a spirited defense from their leaders, not immediate condemnation.